There are a handful of actors whose films I will always see:  Nicolas Cage, Kurt Russell, Liam Neeson.  Maybe it’s not always on the big screen, but I’ll find a way to view their films.

If the movie is just $4—as it was when I saw the latest Liam Neeson vehicle Retribution (2023), it’s a no-brainer.  What’s not to love?  An aging action star with improbably young children taking on a dangerous criminal and all of the Europol and the Berlin Polizei?  Take my money, please!

Is Retribution a great film?  No, it’s not Eyes Wide Shut (1999) or anything, and it’s certainly not the best Liam Neeson film.  It’s essentially the same story behind every Neeson film:  a dad with a respectable job must break all the rules to save his family.

What’s remarkable is that Neeson has made millions off of such a simple premise, packaged and repackaged into various flicks over the past decade.  Retribution is another retreading of the same familiar ground, but somehow, it never gets old.

The film opens with a harried Matt Turner (Liam Neeson) busily getting ready for work at some kind of sketchy hedge fund.  His wife begs him to take the kids to school, as she is meeting a friend for breakfast, and he does so reluctantly.  He is, naturally, estranged from his teenaged son, and his precocious daughter is neglected, but keeping a stiff upper lip (more or less).

Unbeknownst to Turner, a series of bombings have already started throughout Berlin, and his car is also bugged with a pressure plate explosive device:  the minute he sits in his swanky ride, his death warrant is sealed.  He discovers this horrifying fact when a mysterious caller rings him up on a burner cell phone planted in Turner’s vehicle, and he has to devise a way to get his kids to safety while mollifying this deranged bomber, who also has the ability to activate the bomb remotely.

The bulk of the flick is Liam Neeson sitting in a comfortable Mercedes-Benz SUV (the kind of “action” befitting an actor who is seventy-one-years old) talking on a cell phone and trying desperately to figure out how to dupe the seemingly omniscient bomber.  His kids get wind of the scheme, which apparently deals with all of their angst and First World problems pretty quickly; staring death in the buttocks will do that to you.  Naturally, what Turner uncovers is far more insidious and complicated than a mere bomber targeting the key players in a corrupt hedge fund, and there’s a pretty big twist that I initially called, then second-guessed due to a key plot event, only to realized the writers duped me good!

Part of the fun of this kind of thriller is that the protagonist is put into a seemingly impossible spot, and must use only his wits, his will, and extremely limited resources and information to get his way out of it.  The audience has a sense he’s going to get away fine, but how he’s going to manage it is the big question that drives the film along.  There’s also the obligatory stuff about Matt Turner realizing his family is more important than work, etc., etc., but we came for the explosions, not that lame stuff!

The film has not, at the time of writing, earned back its budget.  That’s a shame.  Hollywood needs more low-to-mid-budget flicks out there (Retribution‘s budget was around $20 million, according to Wikipedia), and it looks as though Liam Neeson is not as instantly bankable as he was even five years ago.

All good things must come to an end.  For my part, though, I am hoping for many more years of Liam Neeson playing dads in trouble.  Long Live Liam Neeson!